Necessity Meets Creativity

Award Finalists Include Some
Who Made Old Things New Again

Forget, for a moment, the idea that an innovation has to be something new, either in terms of the problem it solves or when it was invented.

Just ask Mohammad Saidullah, an Indian honey seller in his 60s, who has been peddling his amphibious bicycle around the flood-prone plains of Bihar -- and once or twice across the Ganges -- for the past 30 years.

It's not much to look at -- a sky-blue tangle of spokes, paddles and wooden...